D-Bus Session

The Dbus plugin is most effective in an environment with a valid D-Bus session. This means that a dbus-daemon process should be running and that a DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS variable should be set in the environment.

A common way to ensure that such an environment is available is to include this check in a script that is executed when the user logs in:

Combined with xdotool

DBus can be combined with xdotool to further automate your environment. The following script can be bound to a key binding. If no Firefox is running, it will switch to workspace 3 and start Firefox. If Firefox was already running but not focused, it will switch back to workspace 3 and focus it. If Firefox is already focused, it will open a new tab.